Microsoft is trying its hardest to make Bing search relevant, such as by adding fancy new AI features. But the company wasn’t always so committed to battling Google’s dominance — a new report details how Microsoft tried repeatedly to get Apple to adopt Bing search and even offered to sell Bing to the iPhone maker.
As detailed by CNBC, documents from the U.S. Justice Department’s antitrust case against Google revealed that Microsoft offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018.
Along with the attempt to sell Bing, the documents revealed that Microsoft attempted to get Apple to adopt Bing as the default in the company’s Safari web browser in 2009, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2018 and 2020. Apple declined each time, citing quality issues with Bing search.
Google filed the documents as part of its argument that there’s competition in search and that Google’s search is in the lead position because it’s simply better than the competition — a long-running argument from the company.
However, we’ve also known for some time that Apple and Google have a lucrative revenue-sharing deal that sees Apple earning significant revenue from using Google as the default option. In November, a witness testifying for Google accidentally revealed that Apple gets 36 percent of search revenue from Google searches done in its Safari browser. And, as CNBC notes, Apple’s senior vice president of services, Eddy Cue, previously said that the payments Apple received from Google were why the company hadn’t developed its own search engine.
Header image credit: Microsoft
Source: CNBC
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